[Freud's] views are remarkably similar to those of the great theorist of autocracy, Thomas Hobbes; for he, too, tried to build a s...ocial order on a psychology--and one emphasizing men's fears and passions. Just as Freud imagined that society began from a compact of the brothers who had slain their tyrant father and realized that only in union and renunciation could they avoid the war of all against all, so Hobbes saw men in the state of nature as engaged in ceaseless combat, with peace attainable only by renunciation of virtually all individual rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My father ... pick'd up an opinion, Sir, as a man in a state of nature picks up an apple.--It becomes his own,--and if he is a man... of spirit, he would lose his life rather than give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and ...yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Ob...servation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts f...rom false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature.... People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present war having so long cut off all communication with Great-Britain, we are not able to make a fair estimate of the state ...of science in that country. The spirit in which she wages war is the only sample before our eyes, and that does not seem the legitimate offspring either of science or of civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physica...lly absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. All art is concerned with coming into bei...ng ... for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »